


Becoming the colours that you behold

by Baryshnikov



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Blood, Character Study, Colours, Drinking, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Incest Fantasy, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Purebloods (Harry Potter), Recreational Drug Use, Stream of Consciousness, Suicidal Thoughts, rich people
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-08-25 01:23:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16651615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: A series of drabbles where each character is represented by a different colour





	1. Rabastan: red

**Author's Note:**

> This is the start of a new series and this particular fic is just me getting used to certain characterisations, I wasn't going to publish it but I quite like some of the pieces as character explorations, so here we are. Each chapter is focused around a different character and the colour that I most associate with them.
> 
> I am always open to suggestions of characters and colours to add to this.

Rabastan had always been the other child. The second son, the lesser brother, the other one. Rodolphus was the special one, the clever one, the one with a future; the heir. He was the discardable spare, and everyone knew it. It was common knowledge his parents had wanted a girl, girls were always a desirable second-born, an asset to any pureblood family, rather than a burden. After all, everyone knew two boys was undesirable, unwanted and frankly unnecessary. They didn’t want him, but everyone made the best of it.  
He was often alone, watching his brother grow up and become everything their parents had hoped for. He’d do anything for Rodolphus, anything if he asked. He wanted to be him, craved everything Rodolphus had, and yet at the same time he wanted to be as different as possible, not some sad copy of his brother. He wanted to be his own person that, just happened to have some similarity to his brother.  
Rodolphus was the one who first made him fall in love with the colour red. It had been cold outside and Rodolphus’ nose had bled, red streaking down his perfect skin and staining his lips. It had been so beautiful, so vivid, so absolutely delightful and he’d been unable to get it out of his head for weeks. He’d just lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, imagining the red on that white skin. At some point those visions expanded: Rodolphus would have wipe a hand across his face, smearing blood across his lips, down his throat, dipping rough fingers into his collarbones, tarnishing everything he touched with that pretty red.  
He couldn’t remember exactly when he fantasies had become something else when his own had mimicked the movement of that spectre that still looked suspiciously like his brother. It was made so much worse when Rodolphus returned home with blood on his hands and a smile on his face. In those moments he so badly wanted to join Rodolphus, he wanted to be with him, wanted to touch him, to feel those bloodied hands against his throat. He wanted to taste atrocity, feel its acrid burn, he wanted to have violence on his tongue and someone’s blood on his hands. Somewhere inside him he knew he probably shouldn’t be thinking of his brother like that, probably shouldn’t want to be choked by his bloody hands, probably shouldn’t want his brother’s body so close to him. Somewhere in his mind, he knew his head should not be filled with images of his brother, one red hand squeezing his throat, the other squeezing something else.  
He couldn’t bear to look at Rodolphus after that. Watching at him over breakfast was agony, watching him spread jam across his white toast, watching him eat with his perfect white teeth, watching him swallow so indecently. He couldn’t bear it, so he stopped eating with them, he never explained why. He couldn’t tell them what he wanted his brother to do to him, and even if he did, he wondered whether they would care or whether they would nod and laugh and ignore him.  
Sometimes he couldn’t help but eat with them, whenever they had their friends round, he had to sit there smiling, being the one no one wanted to talk to. He always sat in silence watching everyone eat, it was so distracting, how their red mouth stretched around red meat, so rare it was bleeding into the potatoes, staining the plates with red. Did they see the beauty in the blood? The lifeforce they were consuming? Blood felt so good in his mouth, so metallic in his throat, staining his tongue.  
After these dinners, he liked to stare in the mirror. Once he’d just imagined smearing red across his face, then he’d started daubing red paint, then it became blood. He’d cut himself where no one could see, loving the sharpness against his skin, loving the droplets of red that shone like rubies. He loved to smear it across his face, leaving streaks with his fingers. He loved standing there, holding the sink covered in his own blood, smiling at the monster in the mirror.  
He liked coming home from duels with careless wizards and just staring in that mirror for hours. Touching the red cuts that bled such pretty blood and pressing the red bruises and pinching his split lip until his mouth was filled with his own red blood. He remembered dribbling it down his chin while sliding his hand between his legs. He remembered heaving against the sink, knees weak and thighs squeezed shut, crying out as he imagined a world stained with red.  
He loved it all and though he’d never admit it, he loved the pain of it all. That gorgeous agony of having his body torn open. When he was young, he’d always scoffed at the word masochist, but the older he became, the more he started to like it, having a word that so poignantly described everything he wanted out of his life. So absolutely labelled how he wanted that exquisite pain and that exquisite red to control his life forever.  
He remembered when he fell in love with other red things, how he loved his brother’s wife’s red dress. He wasn’t supposed to look at her like that, but she wasn’t supposed to dress like that: dress so tight in all the right places, eyes so dark and her lipstick... oh her lipstick. That was his favourite, so red, so sexy. After that, all his girlfriends had to wear red lipstick, but still, none of them had her fire, none of them smouldered, they just burned, and they did that too quick. A few weeks and he had used them up, burnt them like a match and discarded them like a cigarette.  
He gained a reputation for going through girls too fast, for dropping them for pathetic reasons and moving on too quickly. He would lose a girl of Friday afternoon and have a new one on his arm by Monday morning, flaunting them like a new shirt he would only ever wear once. But it wasn’t his fault girls didn’t like what he did, it wasn’t his fault they couldn’t give him what he wanted. All the girls he knew were all too delicate, too superficial, too perfect. They wanted a romance, an adventure with the man of their dreams: lying on beaches in the sun and standing on balconies watching fireworks. He wanted something different, someone, fresh and raw, without all the refinement of a proper girl.  
He wanted, needed and craved a different type of girl. He was starving for someone to fill the need deep inside him, someone to fulfil the dissolute dreams he still held within his heart. He wanted a girl with his brother’s auburn hair and his sister-in-law’s tight red dress, he wanted a girl who was painfully authentic, a girl who wanted to be fucked against the sink with the red sunset burning her face. A girl who dreamt of glory when applying her cherry lipstick, a girl with high stilettos and long nails and monsters tearing her heart apart. A girl with a red glow in her eyes as she held his throat a little too tightly and pushed him further towards the things he begged for.  
But what he wanted didn’t exist, at least not in the polite circles he was supposed to walk in, so he found darker circles. Circles with sordid secrets and depraved fantasies, circles with pretty girls who did whatever you wanted for the right price. He would pay anything to be a part of that red phantasmagoria where the walls bled and girls with red hair made him forget reality. He would give anything to become that boy in front of the mirror again, bloody hands shaking as he discovered the degeneracy and the want and the hidden world of the red monster that was consuming him.


	2. Abraxas: pink

Abraxas was one of those people who smelled rich. One of those people who absolutely reeked of old money and old values. His veins flowed with pink champagne and his tongue was dripping with pink diamonds. He didn’t have dreams, he didn’t need them, what other people dreamed of, he had. His world was as pink and temporary as his favourite bubblegum, there was a second when he blew plastic bubbles, and everyone was enthralled and enchanted, and then it was gone and people were so desperate to see it all again.   
Abraxas was the expert in tailored suits and artificial smiles, always pink and always ostentatious, highlighting to the world that he was rich, and they simply weren’t, that he had money to buy such pretty things and quite frankly he didn’t care that they couldn’t afford such things. He would smile from the blanket on the lawn as he sucked on a slice of grapefruit lined with sugar, or as he licked his fingers clean from raspberry juice. With just one drag of his eyes, he could peel back a thousand layers and leave people so exposed to the elements. When they blushed, he knew he had them, all he had to do was smile and they would fall. Abraxas fell in love far too easily, but he broke hearts just as much. He had a thousand smiles to spare and a lovely way of slipping into other people’s lives, a lovely way of smiling, stretching those pink lips and making people promises that dissipated in a cloud of sugar-coated lies.   
He had a way of breaking people that was enviably simple that it was almost painless, at least for him. Abraxas would never explicitly hurt anyone though, that was much too crude, he preferred something more tasteful, more refined, more merciless. Why hurt physically? Bodies would heal, minds were so much harder to save. He liked to leave incisions filled with seeds that would slowly rot people from the inside out. He liked turning people into hedonistic sybarites, that cared for nothing and no one, other than themselves. Like corrupting and corroding and crushing until his prey had turned to dissolved and he could do what he liked with them. He liked to have them hooked on him in one way or another, liked when they begged for his attention, and absolutely loved not giving it to them. He had a cruel streak slithering just below the surface. A subtle savagery, a desire to taste the saccharine sweetness of a carnage he’d created. He’d never questioned why he thought like that, perhaps it was because he didn’t really care for other people, and for someone so sickly sweet, he was exceptionally hollow. There was no substance to his superficial smiles, and his pink pulsating heart was cold. People were playthings, entertainment in an endless world of money and parties and champagne and diamonds. They were fun to toy with and sometimes they could be ever so useful further down the line.   
He fooled them all with that pretty face and those pretty words, and why would anyone question that pale skin and pale eyes, those pink lips were so innocent that they must speak the truth, mustn’t they? They didn’t, the truth was a rarity that felt unpleasant in his mouth, it left a bad taste and made him choke. The truth was overrated, most people would rather hear a decadent lie that made the world seem so lovely than to hear a lie that exposed the true ugliness behind all that affluence.   
Abraxas loved to introduce people to the sickly vision, it was rotting, but they would never see that. He liked watching them fall in love with what they saw, liked hearing them pledge their souls for just a little taste, they always gave everything just to dip their fingers into those pink pools. There was an almost orgiastic pleasure when he watches them be prepared to lose it all because he knows they will. They always dive in before they can swim and why should he be obliged to save them? There is nothing better than watching the purest people fall.  
He knows just how to attract those people. Ever since he was a bit too young Abraxas liked to lie on his back on the marble bannisters, sucking on lollipops and smiling suggestively. He was good at simpering when people came close, good at biting his lip and smirking at what he liked. People never knew they were being sucked in until that could no longer climb out of the maze, he’d so subtly build around them. But by then they were usually under his spell, captivated by his pink scintillating world and so unable to close their eyes and blind themselves to the brilliance.   
He rather liked to hold people too tight, force them to breathe his air until their lungs were clogged with diamond dust, force them to drown in the money they so craved, force them to suffocate on the wealth that clung to him like a perfumed fog. Their eyes were so pretty when they were glazed pink with wonder. He liked dragging them to quiet corridors and whispering pretty words to pretty girls making them blush, and he liked to fuck their wide-eyed brothers against the same pretty walls. He liked to saunter away afterwards and leave them alone with the candyfloss wallpaper and a permanent sense of shame under their skin. He had an exceptional talent for stripping people of their underwear and their dignity. For scratching pink lines into soft skin and sliding between supple thighs. For hypnotising people, intoxicating and enchanting them with all the pink wonders money could buy and then taking advantage of them. But the only people who said that were the ones who were never invited into his cherry blossom world.   
Even so, everyone thought he’d change when he found a wife, that he’d respect her, that he’d stop buying pink pearl necklaces for other women. That maybe he’d stop flashing their husbands smiles. People hoped he’d stop living in a powdered illusion and finally acquire a connection to reality. They were wrong. Abraxas had no intention of ever changing, how could he do that when he was so in love with what he was? He couldn’t ever bear to give up his idol existence, to actually have to work for what he wanted sounded completely beneath him and, honestly, he couldn’t be bothered. Why should he? Everything he could want, he had right here at the click of his fingers.


	3. Evan: white

Evan was still young, Evan was still beautiful, Evan was still saveable. But Evan just didn’t want to be saved. 

He was still perfect but had hollow dreams about broken hearts. There were always white lies were always spilling from his cracked lips and his shivering hands were always so cold against other people’s necks. He was sick. Everyone could see that, not that he’d listen if they said that. He said he was fine, more than fine, that he was tripping on the edge of the world, and he was until he crashed. Evan didn’t like falling back down to earth, didn’t like the coldness, the dullness. He didn’t like feeling like a human, with sticky throat and burning eyes. He’d lie in bed whining to anyone who’d listen, batting those blue eyes and begging for them bring him something to dull the drone of reality. He asked for expensive things: diamonds to please his eyes, fur to heat his freezing hands and white cream that made his fingers smell like mint. Evan liked expensive things that made drowning in madness much more pleasant. White tie dinners, serving oysters with pearls, and ice cream as white as his teeth. He could talk for hours about nothing, and yet whenever people spoke to him, they swore their fingers had touched the tongue of God.   
Evan liked washed-out lights and pale parties and white glitter spread across marble floors. He liked pressed powders that lit cheekbones with diamond fire, so sharp he regularly cut his fingers on them, that’s what he said at least. Said to a crowded room at a party, a shaking hand holding white wine and restless eyes looking for an escape from the painful prison made of human skin. Everyone knew Evan wasn’t of this world, he was too ethereal, too distant, the star in the room waiting for a supernova. Somehow, he managed to be both painfully authentic and obviously fake. The smiles weren’t real unless it was three in the morning and his heart was beating at twice-pace.   
Everything in Evan’s world was artificial, he said he had no reason to live in reality, he said it was so boring, so boring to be like everyone else. That living in a dream was the only true escape from the endless buzzing in his brain that never ever went away. That endless drone made him restless, fingers twitching and tapping and ticking. He couldn’t stop, not until his world was clouded with smoke and ancient visions of pallid futures.   
He said lying awake at night when everyone else was asleep was as magical as it was horrific. His eyes stung, white blurred the edges, and yet he saw things that none of the others would ever see. He had gained a connection to an endless heaven, a nirvana in the sky, and with that connection he would dance on the edge of the world, screaming at the pathetic mortals he saw so far beneath him. He was an angel and a monster with a flair for the dramatic, he flirted with death always dragging it closer to him that he really should. A life that wasn’t so intimately interlinked with death, was not a life worth living he said as if he could see into the next life, and perhaps he could. Evan would never tell his secrets, he preferred people’s mouths to be filled with lies and his monsters to be dressed as angels.   
Everyone knew how he sustained those frozen visions. Everyone knew because his hands were always shaking, and he smiled so sickly, sweet like sugar as he put powdered pills onto his dry tongue, and swallowed them one by one, waiting for his vision to blur and his dreams to spill into reality.   
He would never admit that perhaps he was too pale, that the veins stood too dark against his skin, that his eyes were swathed in empty shadows. He never acknowledged that he was crumbling, dissolving before their eyes, turning to nothing more than dust. He said he wanted to die, though no one believed him. Evan said a lot of things that no one believed. His angelic eyes were so terrible at lying. So terrible when they were wide and rimmed red, up all night seeing stars, laughing with the heavens and holding hands with God.   
Everyone knew Evan had fallen in love with white lines long ago, perfect powdered bliss giving him a reason to smile. He loved to draw them on the table, pale against the wood, reassuring them all that everyone important loved these lines, that everyone did this on a Friday night and then again on Monday morning. Everyone knew normal people didn’t do that. That normal people didn’t have white powder smiles. Normal people didn’t need white capsules to wake up in the morning. Normal people didn’t want coffee martinis for breakfast. It was just Evan. Evan with his sloppy smiles and eyes blown so wide and trembling fingers fumbling for his bible and his cigarettes at six in the morning.   
He always said that reality was overrated, that white dreams fuelled by an artificial bliss were just as satisfying. He wasn’t happy unless he was screaming in his pretty powder prison unless his hands were shaking, and cigarette smoke burned his lungs unless he had a white lady in his hand and was peeling back the shell of his privileged world.   
People said Evan was on his way out, that he wasn’t going to see thirty, he only smiled and said he didn’t want to see twenty. He said being alive was nothing but waiting for the main event and that death was the only thing that set you free. People smiled and nodded and walked away. Evan was not one of them anymore. Not when he could see all the cracks in their pretty white wonderland, not when he danced between white lines and moonlight sonatas, sipping expensive gin from white plastic cups his parents would never find. Evan was an apostate to the old world, he believed in new visions and new dreams and new people. He would follow those he called gods to white-hot end of the world as long they never cut his supply to the bright prophesies he could no longer live without. 

Evan was still young, Evan was still beautiful, Evan was still saveable. But Evan just didn’t want to be saved.


End file.
